scruffy but clean
photo of pope
framed football shirt （signed by?）
He paused, unable to either make out the name scrawled in Sharpie on the shirt, or recognise the team colours.
floor tiled in red and white squares
ditto tablecloths
It wasn’t evident that any of this information mattered, but he was here, and would follow his instincts.
staff young Italians, badly needing shaves
One such approached Nash’s booth now and asked if he’d made his choice, or at least, so Nash interpreted his monosyllabic enquiry.
“What do you recommend?”
This earned a blank stare.
“What’s the chef’s speci—”
“Fettucini’s good.”
With prawns, though their provenance wasn’t mentioned. The travails of the joe in the field. “Very well. And the bruschetta to start. And a glass of the Amarone.” He squinted at the wine list. “That’s number . . . seventeen. A large glass.”
The young man disappeared through the swing doors into the kitchen, and Nash added brusque service to his list.
But the wine arrived swiftly, as did his starter, and the odours filling the room were promising. There was no piped music, which was a plus—no muzak—though a radio played in the kitchen, a football match. He checked his messages as he ate. Nothing of interest bar a note from Claude Whelan, seeking retrospective confirmation that he, Nash, had approved his, Whelan’s, request to examine phone records pertaining to the hub . . . That wouldn’t have gone down well with Diana. It was possible Whelan was less diffident than Nash had thought. He replied, then scanned the headlines: the PM had just shared his vision of post-Brexit Britain as a cultural powerhouse, its film industry the envy of the world—there was more on the Home Office reshuffle, which some were calling a bloodbath; and there’d been a house fire off the Westway. One fatality, as yet unidentified. He laid his phone aside, and thought back to yesterday’s meeting.
It had been his first summons to Sparrow’s presence, but he was aware of precedents. Some had involved civil servants of forty years’ standing, the resulting interviews curtailing their careers in the time it would take to drink a cup of tea, had such courtesy been offered. Others had learned that their departments were coming under new admin structures more directly controlled by Number Ten; “reforms”—a bastardised word if ever there was one—that were in reality a show of strength from a government whose weaknesses had been on national display over the previous eighteen months. This performance was largely due to the prime minister himself, whose sole qualification for the job had been the widespread expectation that he’d achieve it. Having done so, he was clearly dumbstruck by the demands of office: the pay-cut, the long hours, the pandemic, and the shocking degree of accountability involved. For a man who’d made a vocation out of avoidance of responsibility, this last was an ugly blow. Nash didn’t much care about any of that—the man’s character had been evident for decades, and people still voted for him—but it mattered that, as a consequence, the PM had come to rely on a series of advisers whom no one had voted for. And “rely on” was putting it mildly. While the PM still racked up soundbites on a regular basis, they mostly came out as “gottle o’ geer.” His lips might move, but it was Sparrow writing his script.
Sparrow’s script-writing ambitions stretched beyond the odd political broadcast.
“How do you find Diana Taverner?” he had asked Nash the previous afternoon, before the topic of Sophie de Greer had been broached.
“Diana? She’s an effective First Desk.”
In other circumstances, the prospect of a no-holds-barred discussion of Diana’s ups and downs would have been a thrill, but Sparrow was no gossip. Sparrow was the weasel under the cabinet table, his teeth bared and dripping.
“It’s said she’s close to Peter Judd.”
“Judd was Home Secretary while Diana was Second Desk,” Nash said. “Naturally they worked together.”
“And have continued to . . . associate since. Though Judd has some dubious acquaintances.”
Judd had set himself up as an old-school eminence grise, and was currently stage-managing the mayoral ambitions of one Desmond Flint, who might fairly be described as dubious, Nash thought, but was at least prepared to put himself before the electorate. As for the degree to which Diana was involved with Judd, Nash had wondered about that himself, but was wary of airing doubts in front of Sparrow.